Given a choice, who would you rather save: your politician or your puppy?
That’s practically the choice Illinois voters have been faced with after State Sen. Bill Brady was certified as the Republican challenger to Gov. Pat Quinn in the upcoming November elections.
In the closing weeks of the campaign, Brady came under heat for his Feb. 2 sponsorship of legislation that would have permitted animal-control facilities in his state to mass-kill stray shelter animals in gas chambers. Brady would eventually kill his own bill; the damage, however, was neatly summed up by a Chicago Sun-Times graphic that transposed a head shot of Sen. Brady in the bottom-left corner of a photo of precious pitbull puppies. As Illinois political blogger Rich Miller asked his readers, “for crying out loud, you can’t introduce a bill to help out your local puppy gas chamber when you’re trying to be governor. I mean, seriously, what kind of thought process concocts an idea like that?”
What kind of thought process, indeed. Thanks to Brady, we have an excellent excuse to re-visit the stories of previous leaders in the category of attempted campaign suicide — some successful, some not and some who were thankfully denied the opportunity to inflict maximum damage before it was too late.
George Wallace, 1968 presidential election:
Having bypassed the Democratic primary process to run as an independent, Wallace was well positioned heading into the 1968 general election to siphon enough votes away from Republican Richard Nixon and Democrat Hubert Humphrey to send the election to the House of Representatives.
Until, that is, he introduced Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay — the man who oversaw the firebombing of Tokyo, Japan, in the latter stages of World War II — as his running mate. Wallace was described as “visibly shrinking” during the ticket’s introductory press conference, during which LeMay suggested not only that the United States should use nuclear weapons to end the Vietnam War but also that nuclear radiation had made rats in the Bikini Atoll “bigger, fatter and healthier” and that “if I had a choice [between being killed by a nuke or a rusty knife], I’d rather be killed by a nuclear weapon.”
Known by friends as “Claytie,” Williams was leading State Treasurer Ann Richards by more than 20 percentage points in the polls before he made the mistake of opening his mouth. Williams turned off many female voters by ostentatiously refusing to shake Richards’ hand after a debate, telling her to “loosen up and have a drink” and fondly recalling, to reporters, nights spent in Mexican brothels. He would subsequently prove he couldn’t even make small talk about the weather without screwing himself up, telling a group of assembled reporters that “if [the cold and fog are] inevitable, just relax and enjoy it.”
Williams would alienate another bloc of voters when he suggested that Hispanic voters should support him because he met his wife in a Mexican restaurant. On the other hand, one has to assume Williams fared well among the pro-rape cross-section of the electorate.
Jim Bunning, 2004 Kentucky Senate race:
Bunning, set to retire following this last blast of cranky glory, did his utmost to lose his 2004 race against little-known challenger Daniel Mongiardo. Before Mongiardo officially became the Democratic nominee, Bunning told a Republican gathering that Mongiardo — who is of Italian descent — looked and dressed like “one of Saddam Hussein’s sons.”
Voters were then provided with more cause for concern. First, Bunning explained he needed police protection on jaunts throughout Kentucky because of his attraction as a terrorist target. He also refused to debate his opponent in person and instead read prepared remarks over a teleprompter via satellite feed. As if that weren’t enough, he then charged Mongiardo campaign workers with roughing up his wife at a picnic, rendering her “black and blue.”
Bunning, however, would ride George W. Bush’s coattails and go on to win the Kentucky race with 51 percent of the vote to Mongiardo’s 49 percent, providing the curious with further insight as to how Rick Pitino and John Calipari keep their coaching positions.
John Edwards, 2008 Democratic Presidential primary:
One of the fascinating what-if’s of history is always going to be what would have happened had Edwards eked out a victory in the 2008 Democratic primaries. Would those photos of Edwards with Rielle Hunter’s baby have still have leaked out? Would newspapers other than the National Enquirer have pursued the story if it involved a still-active presidential candidate? And if so, would the truth have been unearthed before the August convention?
It remains to be seen whether or not the Illinois electorate will hold Brady’s poor pooch-rights record against him. The story about Mitt Romney strapping his Irish Setter’s dog carrier — with the dog inside — to the roof of his family’s station wagon during a drive from Boston to Ontario never seemed to have hurt him with the voters. (Then again, it remains an open question as to whether Romney had any likability to squander to begin with.)
As for Brady’s case, one is merely left hoping that he won’t try to explain away this fumble by suggesting that the effects of a mass-killing puppy gas chamber are either somehow “inevitable” or will actually lead to fatter, healthier canines — those lines have been tried already.
Editor in Chief Asher Smith is a College junior from Great Neck, N.Y. The above views do not represent the opinions of the Emory Wheel.
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